No problem :)

Linux is obviously the choice for my desktop, especially since I’m not defending against organized crime or a government, but like you said it’s important to understand its strengths and weaknesses.

Disclaimer: I’ve never had a mastodon account.

1. Authentication: who will have accounts? Artists and fans? How can you reduce spam accounts signing up? If you just have open sign-ups and trolls abuse it to mass spam other instances, they might defederate (Lemmy had this issue with a political troll).

2. Always go through all the settings/configuration!

3. if it’s within your means, decorate and personalize the place a little to match your purpose. I dont know how easy it is to do theming adjustments, even simole things like colour scheme. Especially since half the Mastodon sites all look the same.

4. Have something of value. Why should people use your site instead of just twitter and facebook? What can you do that they don’t? Does your audience care about those things? I can talk about FOSS and privacy and security for days but most people don’t care about that enough to join a different site.

As a quick introduction to the idea of Linux phones vs. Android ROMs, this post (updated about a year ago) gives an introduction from a security perspective. Depending on your adversary’s capability, security can be an important dependency of privacy.

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux-phones.html

It sounds like you’re suggesting Linux phones are more private and secure than GrapheneOS. Given their current state and limitations, it is extremely unlikely that any of them are more secure than GrapheneOS against a typical hacker or malicious app.

with the downside that is limited to one single phone brand In terms of security, this is also a benefit. It means they aren’t trying to aim at fifty different targets which may behave different or even unexpectedly. The software developers have far far far more confidence that their security features will work on your device if they test it on theirs.

Again, there is no such thing as “full privacy and security”. It is unpragmatic idealism. Not only does it misinterpret privacy and security as concepts, it is an unconstructive attitude for creating an effective security model, and just encourages burnout for no benefit. We don’t limit “full”. There is no full. There is no perfect answer. It’s an undefined and unachievable idea.

“[Someone made] a laptop, encased in foam in a full Faraday cage, wrapped by alternating metal foils, and finally covered by a 1” layer of reinforced concrete."

"It had been billed as the most secure computer ever. Right until two research papers had come out that showed it was possible to decipher processing by the amount of power being consumed and by pulling the slight RF signal being carried by the ground line. "

Now, I’m not saying you can’t effectively secure your device adequately against big-tech and corporate capitalism. I say you can! It’s achievable. But it’s unconstructive to hold the illusion that there is some absolute “full privacy” against them.

Who are you hiding from? “Increasing privacy” means nothing without context.

My adversaries (well, when I’m not at a protest) are not likely to be tracking my phones location, and my phone is set up that no app or website can, so to me personally it’s a large sacrifice for no benefit.

But for someone else, it could be good advice!

Definitely, especially last year where some persistent obsessed kiddo would keep finding each federated instance with open registration and making low-tier troll accounts on them.

The focused, exclusive communities and the open, chaotic communities both have their place. Those ones blocking the majority of instances to get rid of junk and harassment are perfectly valid, although I personally would definitely need accounts elsewhere.

Yep, one example was gtio.io, which occasionally had a decent topic or two, but about a third of the userbase was from lemmy.ml and another third from wolfballs.com (the former instance which attracted a political ‘right-wing’ userbase). Since lemmy.ml defederated from wolfballs.com, you wouldn’t even see most of the replies from a lemmy.ml account and have to get an extra account somewhere to reply.

Of course, those replies were almost always low-quality garbage, but I did want to see and reply to them!

haha, the paradoxical answer is to make your own personal instance for you to federate and post on all the other communities freely.

(yes, I know ‘just make ur own instance’ isn’t helpful advice because not everyone has the time/money/tech-familiarity to do so, I’m more just pointing out that’s how some people approach the issue of having to pick a community)

I’ve seen a lot of websites (not so much in the Fediverse, but small forums and spin-off forums) and the kinds of basis they have does affect whether people want to post there, and how the place grows. (I’ll just call them instances, because they technically are but I’m not just talking about Fediverse instances, so the dynamics of cross-visibility between sites aren’t really being considered)

Topic-based instances and goal-oriented instances seems like the best bet for a high-quality discussion community. I mean broad topics as well, consider mander.xyz or the former gtio.io, not just more specific ones like slrpnk.net. It can be limiting, but so long as you’re secure enough with your ego that you don’t need to chase high numbers to know you’re stable and active, then I’d recommend it. The tough part is that you may not get as much casual exposure to start off with, by being on the same site as larger communities, you might need to be active (without being annoying) in crossposting good topics to make people aware your community exists.

National-based instances are also popular, probably because of shared language, cultural elements and local issues. But they are otherwise pretty compatible to general instances. They do have a place, I’ve enjoyed a couple on occasion, they have a place, but I do prefer the topic-based communities. There’s no point limiting every topic arbitrarily by nation or state.

General instances (either topicless copy-cats or freely user-defined communities) are hit-or-miss, I personally don’t like them in a federated space unless they are specifically solving an issue.

lemmy.ml is somewhere between topic-based and general. It is explicitly “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers” (I notice that broadened a bit, surprising although no complaints), and you can see that bias in the communities list, but the mods aren’t aggressive with enforcing the topic. There are random sports, country and interest communities here. Whether that’s out of inactivity (volunteer time and effort is limited!) or lax policy (the more the merrier!), it makes this feel more like a general site despite the tagline. I remember last time I checked (admittedly a year ago) the staff were explicit and purposeful that this is not an official instance and was not trying to cater to everyone as a general instance, encouraging people to make more granular instances for things which weren’t meant to go here.

If that is the case (again, policy could be different) then maybe some extra messaging on the Create Community and Register pages could help prevent the regular issue we had when someone fundamentally against the community (like someone kicked from reddit because of racist comments) would show up and be surprised when they were herded out of here too.

I do think it’s important for a site to be willing and able to kick moderators who are abusive, especially in a major community. But as for a formal system for reclaiming a community, it would be up to in individual instance’s staff.

There are struggles with a voting system in a pseudonymous environment like this site: how do you enforce identity? How can you detect if 5 accounts are actually just me and my sockpuppets? And how can you do that without making life horrible for people who want to stay private with tools like proxies and anti-trackers? It’s possible to mitigate some of these problems but it’s not an easy task once a community grows, and can involve compromise.

In a smaller site like this, raising complaints to the instance staff or on a /c/meta like community is a good first step and can be very effective if the case is strong.

I see what you mean. I have seen communities migrate platforms, both successfully or with issues, and a slow sinking ship in a decentralized community (e.g. #BlackTwitter), where the large move of people probably won’t happen suddenly like with a deplatforming, feels like it will be an uncomfortable slow split.

But, like you said with journalism, I sincerely think that they would benefit from the move, or even a split. Twitter is that bad.

heh, I would be surprised if there isn’t already a blocklist for companies like M$

A good thing about community-driven non-profit software is the features which get implemented are typically more in-line with what the users want, rather than adding commercial things like more ads and grifting gimmicks.

It is a mix of ‘has this! doesn’t have that yet’ and some rough edges because it is still young (well, 4 years is young compared to reddit’s 19 years) and only has a handful of developers, many of them hobbyists. But it’s great to see it already growing, and updates are a pleasant surprise rather than a cause for concern.

That’s a good point, those tools would make it easy enough to post and helps add the Fediverse into their view.

I hadn’t realised those social media management tools were also impacted with the API outages, so maybe more and more will be looking towards the competitors, and it seems like Mastodon has finally managed to become a big fish.

Given the context of this post (Fediverse), I’m morbidly curious to see how many simply don’t move to another microblogging platform, like Mastodon. The early Fedi users actively valued the lack of commercialism and popularity-seeking. And I too hope these annoying and harmful things don’t find a home there. There will be brands who try, and being so used to the paradigm of twitter and the mainstream, get pushed away, but I think most won’t even try.

Reputation risk has often been emphasised (in my experience) within companies.

Twitter is now seeing mass exoduses, shutting out organizations on the CEO’s whim, and (while I’m not sure how mainstream this is) being associated with USA right-wing politics. I thought Zucker’s Cambridge Analytica scandal was the best we’d get, but this is a rapid total implosion event. In my privileged position of never liking twitter, I would call it beautiful. But most might prefer ‘train-wreck’.

So yeah, we might see a point where being associated with Twitter becomes not just a waste of time but actively harmful to a company and catching journalistic/consumer flak.

Oh cool, fediverse cross-posting in action.

I hadn’t seen a good scale of the newer cars, when people said it was hard to see young children, I wasn’t thinking “you need to be 15 or older to cross this road”.

In that (rare) situation, you can just say ‘picture of the bird’ to avoid being redundant!

When I ask the strident twits this, I generally get vague homilies and blocks.

Unfortunately, I believe you. Some people take counterpoints very badly, it’s notorious with twitter (and therefore ex-twitter) users.

My response is that demand, in that redundant situation, is insulting to people with visually-imparement and can be disregarded.

Hah, unfortunately the malicious ones will just buy fake/stolen accounts.

If it affects alternative frontends like libreddit, teddit, etc., that will be enough for me to almost completely quit browsing.

Events like this are unpredictable, and it is why places like Lemmy need to always be ready to receive and retain users. I lost some interest because I felt the main instances had similar problems (culturally) to reddit instead of trying to be something better, and that community feedback seemed to go unreceived. The technology can help, but the rest is up to people putting in extra effort.

Torvalds is the kind who doesn’t get into the religious wars, like FOSS vs proprietary and such. So I’m not at all surprised by their post.

Federation for Pixelfed, Mastodon, Pleroma and Peertube solve one main issue which is the lack of freedom of speech.

I completely disagree. In fact, ‘freedom of speech’ is not why I use Lemmy instances as opposed to other sites. I haven’t been banned from any reddit-like site. It’s also not why I use PeerTube. And based on what I’ve seen, 'free speech ’ isn’t the main reason why people use Pixelfed/Mastodon/Pleroma. Most of the millions moving to Mastodon aren’t doing it because they or their friends were banned or censored. The following points apply just as much to those platforms as they do Lemmy:

Even your implicit argument of different rules/moderation isn’t the main reason I use Lemmy’s federation. Federation allows small communities with different communities, different moderation and different softwares to cross-pollinate. This is extremely useful for social media platforms where popularity is (let’s generalize) necessary, and we don’t have the first mover advantage like reddit.

1. Different Lemmy communities don’t have to compete. Progressive liberals can sign up to beehaw, classical liberals can sight up to wolfballs, leninists can sign up to lemmygrad, and ALL OF THEM can subscribe to mander.xyz communities! We’re not forced to pick and choose between a dozen competing environment communities, not hurt by splits in community over moderation differences.

In small communities this helps them stay alive. I’ve been on sites that have died. It’s not fun! That’s one thing federation solves for me.

2. If an instance’s administration suddenly make a choice I don’t like, and I want to change my account to another site, I don’t lose access to all the communities I helped build. This doesn’t even have to be a moderation decision, it can be them changing the software or accidentally breaking it, or worst case, forcing ads or trackers on users. This is Free and Open Source Software. If Lemmy altogether somehow made major software changes I don’t like, I can edit the software and host my own instance. Then I am the moderator, there’s less trust I need to place in other moderators!

Having been a moderator for many highly-liberal (as in liberty, like ‘freedom of speech’) communities, you’ll understand what I mean when I say not all speech is worth reading, even if there is value in letting people be allowed to say it. So, you are right in that federation has an appeal for ‘freeze peach’ idealists. Wolfballs exists and federates, despite their users being banned from the most popular instances. Lemmygrad didn’t want to listen to the neo-nazis who were taking advantage of Wolfballs’s freedoms. So due to federation, Wolfballs still have a platform and community, and Lemmygrad don’t have to waste their time scrolling through it, while both communities have access to other less-political federated instances. That’s a real scenario that happened. Not some idealistic what-if.

Probably Stable, I just use distro default (currenlty 5.15.*)

Well, also that they’re looking for a twitter replacement and not a reddit replacement. It’s not that they’re generally annoyed with the mechanics or format of twitter, but they’re looking for an alternative to its current leadership and direction.

But I suppose them being on Mastodon and therefore being exposed more to interoperable Fediverse platforms could give more causal exposure to PixelFed/Lemmy/PeerTube/etc.

@dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml

Pinging for attention: this is evidently a popular and easy-to-implement change.

I recently ate at a restaurant, we were one of the only two or three dine-in customers and there was a steady stream of delivery orders.

When we finished, we were the only customers left. We talked to the owner’s brother (running the place that night, taking orders and half the cooking) after our meal, and at a point he lamented the trend towards delivery: they nab 30% of the revenue, which is bad enough, but then the food itself is affected: a freshly-cooked naan bread kept in delivery packaging will just it in its steam and get soggy by the time it’s delivered. A five-star dish becomes a three-star dish, and that affects your reviews.

But something that also came through, for me, was how it affects community. The manager-cook took us back into the kitchen, showed us around, let me put my hand in a huge ceramic tandoor, and made it into an experience (and not in the marketing buzzword sense!).

I’ve been raised in a city environment where food, if not made by family or close friends, is purely a commercial service. A smile from a server is the entire humanity of it, or you’re thoughtful, a thank you to the chef. I only know two exceptions rather than this Indian place, which is a kebab store (ordering certain foods will prompt an excited cheer from the staff) and a Japanese sushi store where the tiny open kitchen burst out ‘ohaiyo!’ when the door bell rang. It’s even embedded in our language, for an example, ‘companion’ comes from latin stems meaning ‘with’,‘bread’, com panis, someone you eat with. What happened to communal food culture in ‘the West’?

Well, maybe you get a bit of interaction from the delivery guy if you write notes telling them to dance… sigh

But I’ve also talked to someone who was short on money and ran two delivery jobs (as in, two services simultaneously) while on vacation so we went with them, and they emphasized that a 4 out of 5 is a bad score and that average allows you to be fired.

4 stars is, in no normal rating system, below average. Everyone I ask says that means ‘better than expected’ or ‘above average’.

So yeah, try and order directly from stores (I’ve never used a third-party delivery service) and if you must use delivery or taxi services, give 5 stars if they don’t deserve 1 star.

I’m not a Mastodon/etc. users but I can sympathize with some other sites. Even here has its own Ongoing September from redditors.

I would recommend reaching out to moderation teams and raising awareness, because they probably have far more ability to put global notifications or sign-up messages, and to give warnings to uncomfortable behaviour.

Make sure to call out twitter carryover, in a constructive way, so that people are aware that Mastodon isn’t ‘twitter but here’.

Honestly, if that happened in my city, I’d try and start a chant saying “Fuck Candy Crush” and hope it rewrites the headline.

In a community called World News, it’s useful to make sure the post title shows which country this is about.

Excellent find! It’s appears to be well-organized too, I love that.

I mean, I believe it but it’s a good habit to post sources in communities like this.

Also, what 10_0 said, they know it’s an exploitative platform, much more aware of it than most people.

(I replied to the other comment in detail, you’re right, it was salt.)

You were right to call it dubious, I was incorrectly informed. Salt is considered the major suspected culprit. A search for “japan diet stomach cancer” will give a bunch of studies and articles, I of course can’t verify them but it’s definitely a studied phenomenon. One study says: “Mortality ratios [from stomach cancer] are higher in northern Japan, particularly in areas facing the Japan Sea” while many in the south “show low rates”.

User got 3 days for “getting into fights with many users” global modlog/community modlog

They did have a couple of deleted comments that were correctly hit for rule 2 (although it’s still inconsistent moderation, seeing how worthless insults like this stay up) but being banned for arguing with many people? That’s beyond reasonable. This is a political thread, a bunch of users disagreed with a poorly-made but legitimate critique, and the person gets banned for replying to many of them?

Might as well say ‘this is an echo-chamber, controversial opinions are banned’. I agree, very disappointing, and not based in the site or community rules.

It’s a bit disappointing to ask “where did they get the percentage?” before immediately giving some uncited ones of your own: “individual nations, majority of them supports Ukraine (and US/EU etc)” and using an article from a conservative ‘think tank’ (wiki link) when complaining about propaganda.

[I am not Canadian, but have lived for long times in countries with similar governance]

If we ignore moral/ethical arguments (which certainly can matter! but they shouldn’t be relied on, especially in political contexts), why would the government benefit from doing that?

I can only think of reputational reasons, which would be more easily or effectively achieved by doing other things. It’s one of those things which it would be nice to do, but I don’t think they will. The power plant companies have more influence than those that want affordable housing.

Xonotic, STK and 0 A.D. have been my main 3. They’re pretty fun offline too.

I’ve heard (anecdotally) that the Japanese diet needs to watch for high vinegar (salt, see replies) leading to stomach cancers, but otherwise an excellent diet. And you gotta love raw fish and miso!

Please the report feature to bring up troublesome users (or if really necessary, the lemmy.ml community), this community is for the software called Lemmy.